The Courage of Curt Flood

Every ring has a story to tell, but the one that will be auctioned off in Louisville, Kentucky, tomorrow is more significant than most. It's a 1964 World Series ring that once belonged to Curt Flood. From 1963-1969, Flood won seven consecutive gold gloves as the center fielder for the St. Louis Cardinals. He left the game with a lifetime batting average of .293. But he's best remembered today as the man who sacrificed his career to challenge major league baseball's reserve clause.

It was 40 years ago last month that Flood learned that he had been traded with teammates Tim McCarver, Byron Browne and Joe Hoerner to the Philadelphia Phillies. Unlike those men and scores of others who had gone before him, however, Curt Flood refused to pack his bags. Instead he wrote a letter to commissioner Bowie Kuhn asking to be declared a free agent and when Kuhn refused, Flood took major league baseball to court. It was a courageous stand that cost him what remained of his career—he played only 13 more games (for the Washington Senators in 1971)—and soon left him bankrupt. He ultimately fled to the Spanish island of Majorca where he played guitar and painted portraits.

On June 19, 1972, the Supreme Court voted 5-3 in favor of major league baseball, thus ending Flood's challenge. But his peers in the game, encouraged by what they had seen and heard, soon took up the fight. In 1974, Catfish Hunter was awarded free agency by an arbitrator due to a contract violation by Oakland A's owner Charles Finley. And one year later, Andy Messersmith of the Dodgers challenged the reserve clause by playing out his option year without signing a new contract. Retired pitcher Dave McNally joined him in the cause. Both were granted free agency by arbitrator Peter Seitz.

When Flood left the game in 1971, the Senators had agreed to pay him $110,000 for the season. The average player was earning less than half that. As George Vecsey writes in Baseball: A History of America's Favorite Game, baseball paychecks increased by leaps and bounds in the wake of Flood's stand: "The average salary kept jumping from $51,000 in 1976 to $371,000 in 1985 and $489,000 in 1989 and $880,000 in 1991." When Flood died of throat cancer in 1997, the average major league ball player could expect to earn $1.3 million—all thanks to free agency. And, with little reason to worry about paying the electric bills, players were free to obsess about championship rings.

The ring Curt Flood won in 1964 is expected to fetch at least $15,000 at auction. The copy of the famed 1972 Supreme Court decision that he signed? Well, that should sell for a mere $500-$700.

A-Rod Gets His Ring

So it sounds like Alex Rodriguez is a changed man. To hear people talk, he's undergone this incredible transformation. He started the baseball season as a self-centered, steroid-taking "fraud" (as his former manager Joe Torre famously let slip in The Yankee Years) and in the course of 139 games, he became this likable, magnanimous, clutch-hitting champion.

Such is the magic of the championship ring.

I know this because I've studied it for years. Back in the mid-1990s, when I was a senior editor at ESPN The Magazine, I read a lot of newspapers searching for story ideas. The New York Times. Washington Post. Chicago Tribune. Dallas Morning News. Atlanta Constitution Journal. It didn't take long—or any particular genius—to notice how infatuated sportswriters have become with championship rings. They love to use them as shorthand. "Tom Brady has three... Derek Jeter has five." That sort of thing.

The more I read, the more I came to view the people who own them as royalty—members of the most select fraternity in America. Forget about Skull & Bones, the Yale playground of George W. Bush. This club boasted Michael Jordan, Joe Montana and Wayne Gretzky.

Dan Marino wasn't good enough to cross the threshold.

Neither were John Stockton and Karl Malone.

Ted Williams? Sorry, but that name doesn't appear on the list.

This is an absurd way of thinking, of course. How could anyone question the athletic achievements of those men? Marino holds 17 NFL passing records. He was an eight-time All-Pro, the MVP of the league in 1984, and his chiseled chin now graces a bust in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. And yet, thousands of people—on sports talk radio, in newspapers and on the internet—continue to debate Marino's legacy. One even suggested that the quarterback's name be added to the urban dictionary. The definition: "Someone who possesses no jewelry." As in: "That fool is broke, he's Dan Marino."

Now come on. Do you honestly think that Marino sits around wishing he were more like Charlie Batch, a man who earned two Super Bowl rings as Ben Roethlisberger's backup?

Still, flawed though it may be as a standard of measurement, the championship ring is hard to dismiss. Even great athletes buy into its mythology. Junior Seau returned to New England last month for a 20th season of pro football—at age 40—because he does not yet have one. "If I had a ring in place," he said, "I'd probably think otherwise." And Ray Bourque surely must endorse that decision. He requested a trade after 21 seasons with the Boston Bruins, tipping his hat to his teammates and jetting off to Colorado. Why? Because he desperately wanted to leave the game with a ring full of diamonds on his finger. He called it quits a year and a half later—17 days after earning his prize.

The first championship rings were handed out in 1922 to the New York Baseball Giants, a team that soundly defeated the Yankees in five games to win the World Series. (Want some idea of how long ago that was? Game Two ended in a 3-3 tie. It was called after 10 innings on account of darkness.) The Giants players weren't exactly overwhelmed by the gesture. One year earlier, outfielder Casey Stengel had pointed out the game's true spoils when he said, "I'm going home with the winner's share of that old World Series coin!" For winning the 1922 classic, he and his teammates each received a $4,545 bonus, a princely sum when you consider that Yankee first baseman Wally Pipp, a proven home run hitter, earned only $6,500 a year. And pitcher Bob Shawkey, a three-time, 20-game winner, pulled down $8,500. Even the great Babe Ruth kneeled before the Almighty Dollar. He was suspended for the first six weeks of the 1922 season for defying baseball's ban against barnstorming World Series squads.

The Yankee powerhouses of the forties and fifties were no fonder of their rings. In 1951, after winning three titles in four years, Yogi Berra requested a pocket watch. In '52, he took home a silver cigarette case.* Frank Crosetti, the team's shortstop, preferred rifles with World Series Champions stamped on the barrels. Two decades later, Roy Blount Jr. of Sports Illustrated would write of Crosetti: "He is said to have become wealthy from 23 World Series purses gathered as a player and a coach." In that very same issue, Oscar Robertson rejoiced after finally securing his one and only world championship without making a single mention of a ring. In fact, the earliest reference I have found to the much-heralded talisman appeared in a 1976 Sports Illustrated profile of Jack Lambert who, Robert F. Jones wrote, won "two rings in his first two years." It was those same Steelers, the team of the decade in which athletes' salaries took the first great leap into the stratosphere, who put the championship ring on the map. Free to quietly pocket their $18,000 Super Bowl bonuses, they assaulted our consciousness with a dreadful disco fight song...

We are the Steelers, the Super Steelers,

We know how to get the job done.

We are the Steelers, the Super Steelers,

We'll have one for the thumb in '81.

The gods of football were no doubt appalled. It took Pittsburgh 26 more years to win that fifth ring.

Will owning a championship ring truly transform A-Rod's life? Who can say? It did very little to save Sweet Lou Johnson from heartache. And it certainly didn't rescue those Steelers of the seventies from tragedy. Rocky Bleier sold his four Super Bowl rings for $40,000 in 1996. Two days later, he filed for bankruptcy. Backup Joe Gilliam lost two to cocaine and heroin while living in a cardboard box beneath a bridge. He died of a heart attack at age 49 on Christmas Day 2000. And Mike Webster was a defeated man suffering from brain damage and depression when his heart gave out on him in an Iron City hospital room on September 24, 2002. He was so dependent on Ritalin he was arrested for forging prescriptions. His 18-year-old son Garret had to look after him as if he were a child. There were days, he said, when his father simply could not lift himself off the couch.

* Years later, George Steinbrenner presented Yogi with a complete set of 10 replica rings to make amends for firing him as Yankee manager.